Our Land. Our Voice.

our land is sacred

New Mexico is an island of authentic, land-based culture with direct and unbroken generational ties going back thousands of years. The value of our cultures and their traditional land use values are simply incalculable. Our land is our culture, and our culture is sacred. Here for thousands of years before the modern American settler, rancher, or oil developer ever set foot, the history of the ancient people in these lands breathes in the vast open lands of New Mexico.

New Mexico’s cultural diversity – and the historical context of that cultural diversity – is not something to be underestimated in its complexity and nuance. Each of these distinct cultures and their subcultures slowly evolved within isolated niches and ecosystems, in some cases separated and in others united by the rugged and varied topography of our state.

The Jornada Mogollon people foraged, farmed and hunted here, thousands of years ago. They built their villages, raised their families, and left behind priceless artifacts of their culture and way of life in the Mimbres Valley, the Gila Wilderness, and the Organ Mountains Desert Peaks National Monument. Our public lands hold the key to the chronicles of these ancient people.

Embedded deep within the public national forests, parks, and monuments of central and northern New Mexico, the stories of the Ancestral Puebloan people come to life. Their family pit houses, cliffside dwellings, grand kivas, petroglyphs and archaeoastronomical relics speak of the triumphs and tragedies of an ancient people who found purpose and meaning in the landscapes that politicians and private interests threaten to destroy today. Their stories live on in places like the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument.

The Piro-Manso-Tiwa, Pueblo, Apache, Zuni, and Navajo people - our brothers - hold our public lands sacred. For their unpolluted skies and wide-open vistas; for the sparkle of clean water in our wild streams. For their desert peaks, for the ancient trees in our forests, and the stories traveling in the wind. As do we.

The history and proliferation of the modern American Mestizo, too, is written north and south across the Rio Bravo and across New Mexico. Our Hispanic ethnicity, shared history and culture was written here - long before cattle grazing or mineral development.